Category Archives: paint

The AFI Litchfield facility has officially been open for two years now. 2018 has again brought new additions to the team and especially the equipment in the facility. Efficiency is the name of the game in Litchfield and 2018 has brought many improvements to racking and floor space. We have also added a 140’ x 40’ pad of concrete in our loading area outside of the building to help our process run smoothly.

Over the past year, the Litchfield facility has seen some major growth in business. We have had to match that growth with staffing and equipment. One of the major equipment additions to the facility is the third blast room that is being installed in December. This blast room is thirty feet long and will shoot steel grit media. This investment is addressing our biggest bottleneck in Litchfield over the past year and it will be up and running by mid-December.

Focusing on plant efficiency has been a major undertaking this year. There have been improvements to rack design for a few different projects that have cut our handling time down dramatically. Many times, it is the large projects that make sense to design new racking, but everything we design has thoughts about how to reuse it on a variety of projects. We have also gained floor space by reorganizing and using the new concrete pad outside to store unused racks.

The addition of the expanded concrete loading area has been a very good investment thus far. It has about doubled our usable space to turn around, unload trucks, and store racks. It is especially helpful in the spring when the old loading area would get very soft from the thaw of the frost

Preparations are being made at the AFI– Mankato facility for an expansion. PEM, AFI’s sister company, will be building a new facility on the lot to showcase their paint pretreatment equipment. The new building will have a state-of-the-art training center for all-things pretreatment. PEM currently uses some space within the AFI building as well as another building on the property. This project will allow AFI to move into these spaces gaining critical room to expand operations.

The new building will start going up in the spring and is planned to be completed by the end of 2019!

Associated Finishing, Inc. is opening a third facility in Litchfield, MN to expand our capabilities and add capacity. The Litchfield facility will be operational in early December 2016 and has 27,000 sq feet of production space that will be used in a variety of ways. The large batch system includes a spray bay, abrasive blast room, powder/liquid paint booth, and oven that can accommodate a 40′ part. Once the large batch system is up-and-running, we will be adding a conveyor line that can handle a 20′ part. This will increase our efficiency and lower prices on parts that will fit on the line. There is also plans for a second conveyor line in the future. AFI is excited about how this new expansion will have a positive effect on our current customers and we are looking forward to the new relationships it will bring!